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Sometimes creative ideas seem to arrive without effort —
after all, “such flashes of insight are the very cliché of the
creative genius,” writes Arne Dietrich, a professor of cognitive
neuroscience at the American University of Beirut in Lebanon, in
Scientific American Mind.

Dietrich continues:

“But it only takes a moment’s reflection to see that the opposite
also holds. For all the uplifting stories, the Einsteins riding
on beams of light, the Newtons watching falling apples (a myth
likely originating from Voltaire) or the Archimedeses displacing
bathwater, creative ideas can just as easily be the result of
laborious trial and error, which — clearly — requires the
activation of executive processes in the [brain's center of
higher cognition].

What would we otherwise make of Edison’s ‘empirical dragnet’
method that yielded a total of 1093 patents; Watson and
Crick’s algorithmic approach to testing the stability of DNA base
pairs; Bach’s assembly-line tactic to composing hundreds of
cantatas; the imaginative ways in which NASA
engineers solved the problems of the otherwise doomed Apollo 13
mission; or the countless occasions each one of us has converged
on a creative solution by systematically eliminating alternative
possibilities?” (Read more
here.)

Dietrich points out the error of “seeing creativity as
one thing, but not the other.”

I would also add that the “flash of insight” model of
creativity may lead some to adopt a fixed notion or mindset
regarding intelligence — ”Well, I’m not a genius who gets these
flashes of insight, so I must not be creative.”

Whereas the “trial and error” model — laborious though it
might be — is perfectly in sync with the “growth mindset” that
sees intelligence and ability as incrementally acquired.